How the Other Half Lives

Riis enters “Jewtown,” from Bayard to Baxter Street, where “[t]he jargon of the street, the signs of the sidewalk, the manner and dress of the people, their unmistakable physiognomy, betray their race at every step” (104). This is the language of Riis’s native Europe, and in a few decades the prejudices and attitudes behind this thinking would plunge that continent into war and darkness. In “Jewtown” the tenements are taller and the “tramps” are fewer, for everyone is busy, though one photograph (“A Tramp’s Nest in Ludlow Street”) does depict a man sleeping on a dirty floor. The chapter is littered with racial epithets, e.g. “Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over” (106). Yet somehow there is desperate poverty. Disease abounds in these tenements, as do petty conflicts that exasperate the police. Above all, there is activity. An image (“A Market Scene in the Jewish Quarter”) depicts dozens of people looking over fruit stands at a corner store and milling about in front of every shop on the street. Many synagogues “consist of a scantily furnished room in a rear tenement” (112). Whereas the Chinese tenants are obsessively neat, the Jewish tenants are habitually dirty; Riis nonetheless seems to hold the latter group one small notch above the former. In public schools, Jewish children exceed their peers in math. Indeed, Riis finds it “surprising to see how strong the instinct of dollars and cents is in them” (114). Riis even suggests that a few Jewish tenants have set fires, some of which proved deadly, to collect on furniture insurance. On Thursday night and Friday morning, Jewish tenants are out in force for the “Pig-market,” probably a derisive term for an event where everything but pork is sold (115). There are pants (suspenders) peddlers everywhere. An image (“The Old Clo’e’s Man—In the Jewish Quarters”) depicts one such peddler in front of a store with dozens of pairs of pants for sale folded on a table or hanging on a clothes-line. Health officials, accompanied by policemen, raid the market and confiscate rotten food items. Tenants scatter and lock their doors—a common reaction to the sight of armed officialdom by people accustomed to persecution.